The sun came out again!

-
Today was dedicated to rest. I picked up some sort of head cold bug either on the way over or just before I left. Not much in the way of symptoms, in my case just a painful tightness in the chest that turned into an ugly cough. I felt pretty crappy on the Cluny Musée day but soldiered through it and yesterday I was quite a bit better. Last night it grabbed MLW and so today was her down day. We spent it hanging out, reading and napping. By late afternoon though it was time to get some air and so we took a walk down to Bon Marché to collect some dinner. 

 What a difference a day makes. Friday night was busy, Saturday night was mobbed. We had a short list of staples and decided on another interesting quiche for dinner. While we were heading to the checkout, I saw the juice aisle and had a memory - last night while I was lying in bed trying to fall asleep, I thought about Blood Orange juice. Blutorange was the name of the German product I used to buy at Metro in Dalian and it was one of those little things that really kept me sane during my time there. I developed a taste for it and remember being crestfallen when close to the end of my term there, it disappeared. I suppose the ship carrying the Blood Orange supply must have gone down in the middle of the Pacific, or perhaps it was on a train that was hijacked in Tajikistan, because it disappeared I never saw it again. In any store. And it was sad. But here I was, close to the source and lo and behold, there it was Oranges Sanguines as it's known here. I grabbed a bottle and checked out.

 On the way home I unloaded some more of those useless Euros, this time with an old down at the heel Santa Claus type. He was very grateful. As we walked up our rue, the sky was completely crystal clear and the sun was just disappearing at the buildings off in the distance. A truly nice night.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A regular day

-
Image
A word or two about food. In China, dinner is a completely different event than what we are used to in the west. First of all, large quantities and a vast selection of food is brought to the table. Secondly, you don’t take your “share”; you eat a little, spin the Lazy Susan and rest a lot between mouthfuls. It’s all about turning dinner into an event for visiting. And you order so much that you leave some behind, as a gesture to the host indicating that you have been served plenty. The last two meals for me have been grand repasts. Last night the IT team went out for a traditional Shanghaiese meal in a 1930s converted row house. The trip in to our private room was down a multitude of halls and up continuous little staircases that evoked the passage into Gryffindor Tower in the Harry Potter books. The room we had was more than likely a bedroom in the home of a prosperous, pre-war family. As always, the food was delicious and interesting. A mixture of hot and cold dishes comprising the f...
Read more

NO8DO

-
Image
Last fall I decided to get a tattoo - not so much to express my individuality (as just about every other person has now done) but more to have the experience of getting needled as well as to see how having a permanent piece of portable art would make me feel. The problem was what to get. Tattoo shops are loaded with catalogs of both standard drawings and freelance work. The breadth of options is staggering if you only want something canned. My thoughts went in the other direction - I wanted something that meant something to me, characteristic of my life experience. So I thought about meaningful statements, written in Sanskrit or some other obscure language, or maybe something to do with a bicycle. Or maybe something Chinese. Or who knows, the only thing I did know was that I didn’t want a giant orange Japanese Koi wrapping around my biceps. One day it came to me. While wandering around Sevilla last year, we saw the same logo over and over, on anything that had to do with the m...
Read more

Home again

-
Image
It's always great to be back, despite the slog it takes to get here. This trip was particularly mundane, despite the length and the 24 hours of awakedness it required to complete it. On the plane I was lucky enough to have an empty seat between me and the other person in the row. Sadly she was a space-hog who assumed the gap was for her personal use and filled it with computers, blankets, reading glasses, other stuff and a 1/2 full glass of water. Did have one little traveling oddity though. When I left two Saturdays ago I sat across from a couple on the ABQ to SFO run. They were well-dressed and of an age, the kind of people I might hang out with in real life. Sitting in the SFO waiting area and munching on a turkey-avocado sandwich on a chewy croissant, I looked up and there they were, sitting across from me. We boarded the plane and once again, they had the row opposite. This being too serendipitous, I excused myself and told the man the situation. He said he recognized me but t...
Read more